Despite hurdles, Alwar Aadhaar ready

ALWAR: After the interaction session with finance ministerP Chidambaram, Alwar district authorities said the Aadhaar-enabled direct cash transfer schemes will be rolled out from January 1, 2013, the deadline announced by the Centre for rolling out the services in 43 districts of the country. Top officials said the welfare programmes under nine government departments covering 34 schemes will be implemented and digitization of data base for all the beneficiaries have been completed.

"The first stage for rolling out Aadhaar-enabled direct cash transfer of welfare schemes is digitization of the data base, which we have already done. Bank accounts of all beneficiaries have also been opened except for Janani Suraksha Yojana. In that scheme also we have opened bank accounts of 77% beneficiaries and the remaining 23% will be completed in one week," Ashutosh Pednekar, district collector, Alwar.

With regard to the Aadhaar cards, 6.5 lakh people have already been covered but the authorities still need to seed 77,000 cards with the bank accounts. "We will be able to link the remaining UID cards with the bank accounts well before the deadline. There are no apprehensions about missing the deadline," said Pednekar.

Instead of covering the whole district under Aadhaar, the authorities are targeting only the beneficiaries of the schemes to meet the deadline. The fact that only 22% of people in Alwar have been issued.

Aadhaar cards so far, focusing only on the beneficiaries will be only way to meet the time stipulation.

Chidambaram said that unless 98% of the people have a bank account with 80% of them having Aadhaar cards, the services won't be implemented.

However, some bankers present in the meeting said that it would be challenging to transfer cash benefits based on Aadhaar format. They said direct payments could be done through bank accounts initially and the district authorities may link bank accounts with aadhaar later. While money could be transferred to bank accounts, only aadhaar can eliminate duplicacies. There are also challenges in appointing banking correspondents and providing them with micro ATMs in such a short period of time. The direct cash transfer mechanism aims to take banking facilities to the doorsteps of the beneficiary.

While the pilot project in Alwar district is set to take off, its fate in the other two districts - Ajmer and %Udaipur - is still not clear.